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Italian Jelly
This is made with any fruit jelly. Take an earthenware mould which has previously lain in cold water for two or three hours, fill it about half-way up with jelly. When it is quite firm, place upon it a thick layer of stiff blancmange, cut to the size of the mould. Now fill up with another fruit jelly nearly cold.
A layered set dessert rather than a cooked dish: the whole thing turns on temperature control at the moment each layer goes in. Nothing here needs modernising except the technique, which is easy to get wrong.
- The hinge: "nearly cold"The top layer of jelly should be cooled until it is thick but still just pourable. Poured warm, it risks melting the blancmange and the layers bleed into a murky band.
- The soaked mouldPorous earthenware was soaked so the jelly would release cleanly. A modern metal or silicone mould needs no soaking; instead dip a metal mould for a few seconds in hot water to turn out, or simply flex a silicone one.
- Setting agentVictorian fruit jelly was set with isinglass or gelatine, and moulded jellies of this kind were made stiff enough to stand when turned out. If using leaf or powdered gelatine, aim for a jelly that holds a sharp cut edge, since the middle layer has to bear the weight of the third.
- BlancmangeHere it means the stiff cornflour-and-milk kind (or an almond cream set with gelatine), not a loose pudding. It must be set hard enough to lift and cut as a slab; a soft blancmange will smear when the last jelly is poured over.
- Cutting to sizeSet the blancmange separately in a shallow tray, then cut a disc or shape to the mould's cross-section at that height; cutting it a shade smaller lets the jelly seal round the edges.
- Chilling between layersLet each layer set quite firm before the next goes in, as the recipe directs. Rushing the first jelly gives a soft base that the blancmange sinks into.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; scale the layers to whatever mould you have. Turn out onto a wetted plate so the jelly can be slid into place if it lands off-centre.
Moulded jellies of this kind were a staple of the Victorian supper table. The appeal was visual: gelatine had become cheaper and more reliable over the course of the century, tinned and sheet gelatine displacing the laborious calf's-foot stock and isinglass of earlier generations, and a clear jelly with a white band running through it advertised the cook's patience. Blancmange itself is much older — the medieval blanc manger combined pounded chicken and almonds with rice and sugar — and by this period had settled into the sweet cornflour or almond cream that a Victorian kitchen could set in a tray and cut to shape.